Amy and Philip waved all the way to the airlock ladder.
“Betsy, come on!” yelled Sunflower. “This way.”
The terrier had been following Sooka Black and the official seal carrier, but at hearing Sunflower, he turned and darted across the tarmac.
“I thought I was staying,” said the dog. “I always get confused.”
“I think your knowledge implant came loose. Let me find something big and heavy to knock it back into place.”
“Thanks, Sunflower,” said Betsy, as he climbed the ladder. “You’re the best!”
Chapter Fifteen
Crates and oddly-shaped tools littered the floor of the transmat chamber. MacGuffin stood in front of an open wall panel, holding a pair of metal paddles on either side of an obsidian sphere the size of a basketball. A column of blue energy rose from a cylinder in the wall, passed through the floating sphere and into another cylinder above, generating a thick, acrid smell and a hiss and crackle like milk poured into a giant bowl of rice cereal.
Amy stepped into the room and stumbled over a box. “Whoa, MacGuffin! Didn’t your mother teach you to pick up your toys?”
The Siamese cat bared his fangs, but kept the paddles steady on either side of the black sphere.
“Do not disturb me at this critical juncture,” he hissed. “This procedure is far too dangerous.”
Amy sighed and clasped her hands behind her back.
“Do not tap your feet,” said MacGuffin. “Do not whistle. Do not make a sound.”
“Sorry.”
“That was a sound.”
Amy stood quietly and tried not to move a muscle. After several long minutes, MacGuffin stepped on a button near his foot and lay the paddles in a cushioned metal case.
“Done.”
Amy let out a huge sigh. “Great. What are you doing that’s so important?”
“Calibrating the recombinator so that you may return home.”
“I guess you’re staying with us, then? That would explain the forty-thousand boxes in the corridor. Believe me, I counted.”
The Siamese cat grimaced and closed the lid on the case at his feet.
“Only as long as it takes to fix the transmat drive. I am depending upon your goodwill, and hope you can take me to Alpha Centauri. The Lady would never look for the most celebrated scientist that Meowie University has ever produced among the most backward species in the galaxy.”
“What exactly did you fix?”
MacGuffin waved a brown paw at the sphere. “The recombinator matrix. Completely replaced.” He closed the wall panel and tugged the handle of another panel nearby, but it remained shut. “I’ve temporarily wired an elemental chamber behind this compartment. One second, please.”
Amy picked a tool from the floor that looked like a black-handled Philips screwdriver, and began flipping it over and over in one hand.
“What’s an elemental chamber?”
The cat rubbed his paws together and pulled at the door handle again.
“If you have a sufficient quantity of pure atoms from a dimension, theoretically you can return to that dimension. Gold and other dense metals would be the only feasible candidates, given the size constraints of our equipment.”
“This is different from the way the Lady does it?”
MacGuffin shook his head. “The Lady creates a link with the Spacebook network before transmatting, and can return using the information from that signal. This is completely different. The Lady only wants her operators to transmat into a dimension, steal an object of extreme value, and remat back to her ship.”
“I’m trying to get back to where I came from in the first place,” said Amy, still flipping the screwdriver.
MacGuffin gestured to the door. “Could you please give me a paw with this?”
“Give you a paw. That’s funny.”
Amy jerked open the wide metal panel, and a golden light streamed into the transmat room. The gold Super Nintendo glowed inside, covered in silver mesh and a web of red and black wires.
“Whoa,” she whispered.
“A temporary fix,” said MacGuffin. “I had to route the transmat drive of the entire ship through this block of metal, and disable the security override. It’s amazing if you think about it! This entire ship can travel through dimensions.”
“I know,” said Amy. “I’ve done it.”
“Close the panel, please. I just told you the overrides are disabled, and the drive could misfire if anything touches it.”
“Stop yelling, okay? You’re like my mom.”
Amy casually flipped the screwdriver into the air, but fumbled the catch on the way down. The screwdriver bounced into the elemental chamber and wobbled to a final resting place on the silver mesh.
“Blessed Saint Mittens and his three legs!” screamed MacGuffin, hopping up and down. “Don’t touch it!”
Amy shrugged. “Take a chill pill. Nothing exploded or anything. It’s okay.”
The Siamese cat pulled at his ears with both paws. “You poona brain! Centaurans really are the dumbest creatures in the universe!”
“I’m not from Alpha Centauri, I’m from … Earthhhh ….”
The universe slowed to a crawl as Amy spoke the last few syllables. The air thickened into a soup of aquamarine honey that boiled on her skin and tasted of burnt toast. The searing heat became a chill that flashed through her body and turned everything around her to white nothingness. Amy inhaled the sweet, burnt soup and closed her eyes.
She opened them a second later and blinked at MacGuffin.
“Um … what just happened?”
The Siamese cat shook his head. “That was the worst experience I’ve ever had in my life, and I’ve been married twice!”
Amy pushed blonde hair out of her eyes. “It felt like a demat––like we crossed into another dimension.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Blanche, did we just do what I think we did?”
“I cannot read your mind, captain,” said the ship calmly. “I assume you are referring to our recent dematerialization of twenty-five seconds ago. This would not have happened if a particular override had been in place.”
MacGuffin stamped his foot. “I wouldn’t have disabled the override if I knew that a clumsy human would have been dropping things everywhere!”
“Sorry.”
MacGuffin sighed and searched through his scattered tools. “Your apology changes nothing. I suggest you stampede down to the navigation room with those huge monkey legs and discover our precise location in the galaxy.”
PHILIP AND AMY stood surrounded by space, the unmistakeable blue-and-white marble of Earth below their feet.
Philip squeezed her hand. “Home at last, dear.”
“Right on!” Amy hugged the dark-haired teen around the neck and kissed him. “Blanche, plot a course to California,” she said. “Pacific Grove.”
“As you wish, my Lady.”
Amy shook her head. “She keeps calling me that even though I hate it.”
A circle of light opened in the stars, and Sunflower, Betsy, Nick, and Nistra stepped into the navigation room from the corridor.
“Not this place again,” said Sunflower, catching sight of the blue planet. “I mean––‘yay.’”
Betsy barked and jumped in the air. “I love Old Earth! This is Old Earth, right? Not the Earth with lots of craters and radiation and scary mutants?”
“Honestly, I can’t tell the difference,” said Sunflower.
Nick buzzed across the room to Amy. “Ooo, time for girls to go shopping,” said the tiny sprite. “Promise me we’ll go shopping?”
Amy smiled. “I promise. No boys allowed.”
“There certainly is much water,” said Nistra. “Vast farms for the purpose of raising poona would be easy on such a planet.”
“Don’t get any ideas,” said Amy.
The ship matched the Earth’s rotation and carved a path through the upper atmosphere, slowly descending through a dozen orbits to ensure a safe entry. Amy a
nd the crew didn’t mind, as they watched the continents and swirling clouds pass far below their feet.
“Rain over England, as always,” said Philip.
Amy squinted at the continent of Europe. “I thought we’d see more cities and bridges and crap. Everyone’s always talking about how you can see this or that from space. I don’t see anything!”
“What about the Great Wall? We saw that when China passed below.”
Amy shrugged. “Sure, but what about the cities?”
The air grew thick and whipped over the silver skin of the ship. Night fell as they descended toward the Baja coast of Mexico and turned north to follow the California coast. Near Big Sur the moon turned the Pacific Ocean white, creating a stark contrast with the the dark, rocky shoreline. Beyond the mountains Amy saw the Monterey Bay––a huge, curving divot in the rocky coast, carved out by the galaxy’s largest ice cream scoop.
“There’s the lighthouse! On the southwest side edge of the bay. See the rotating light?”
The ship dropped in altitude. Amy felt something inside her stomach fall as well.
“Where are all the streetlights?” she whispered. “There are trees everywhere and barely any houses!”
Philip pointed out a collection of wooden buildings standing along an orderly grid of dirt lanes.
“Look at those fine houses. Nothing to sniff at, by Jove. It’s a small village with more trees than citizens, I suppose, but would be a pleasant area to call home. From the way you described it, love, I imagined a mad circus of men and machines all stacked on top of each other. Ah yes! Look there––you can see the smoke from a steam train, even after dark. How refreshing to know that some things never change.”
Amy stamped her foot. “Philip, it’s not my home! We’re in Pacific Grove, but it’s not the right year!”
EPILOGUE
The middle-aged woman applied mascara in a small mirror held by the sharp, talon-like fingers of an artificial hand. No attempt was made to disguise the mechanical limb or disguise it with flesh-colored material. The polished metal bones and twisted black and red wiring lay exposed for anyone to see as the joints clicked and spun with oily efficiency.
She had Amy’s face, but with thirty more years of fine lines, stress, and sagging eyelids. Time and practice with makeup helped to conceal some of those imperfections, but she made no effort to hide a terrible wound that slashed the left side of her face. The ragged scar started in the blonde hairline above her left temple, dropped over the highest point of her cheekbone to the edge of her mouth, and tapered at her chin. Marbled pink and white, the ancient injury contrasted sharply with her deep red lipstick, mahogany eye shadow, and the black mascara she applied with a curved pen. The woman set down the applicator and picked up a hairbrush.
She wore a white silk blouse and a skirt the color of wet sheep. A matching gray jacket hung from a hook on the wall next to several lockers and a full-size bed covered in a dark gray blanket. The rooms were efficient, cold, and gray, with all the character and joy of the control room on a nuclear submarine.
The woman stopped brushing in mid-stroke at the sound of a faint warbling. The sound grew louder as she walked through the bedroom into a small office, where a red light flashed on top of a steel desk. The woman pressed a button next to the light.
“Yes?”
“Captain, the target has dematerialized,” said a young female voice. “You wanted to be notified if that happened.”
“Did the tracker repeat the signal?”
“Yes. We have the information.”
“I’m coming up.”
The woman ran the brush once more through her long blonde hair and slid her arms through the jacket that matched her gray skirt, taking care not to rip the fabric with the talons of her artificial hand.
She strolled through an extremely narrow corridor, stooping to avoid brushing her head on the low ceiling. Along her path, cats in black berets swung open a series of oblong metal hatches for her, saluted with paws to their berets, and closed the hatches as she passed.
The woman stepped through the last hatch and into a large, spherical compartment. A series of large screens formed a line across the curved walls, each displaying a different view of a cloudy brown planet tipped with green at the north and south poles. A human-sized chair padded with black leather stood in the center of the floor, behind two rows of cats and dogs at miniature terminals. Another row of cats and dogs were seated at terminals above the display screens, with a metal ladder on either side. The room was silent apart from the hum of electrical equipment and the soft click of paws on keyboards.
The woman smoothed the back of her skirt with her human left hand and sat in the central chair, crossing one leg over the other. A gray shorthaired cat wearing a headset timidly approached the chair from behind, the pink bow of a plastic barrette pinned to the fur on top of her head.
“Show me the data,” said the woman.
The gray cat handed her an electronic tablet. The woman scanned through rows of numbers for a moment and handed it back.
“Good,” she said. “Open comm lines to Two, Three, and Four.”
“Yes, my Lady,” said the cat, her voice wavering.
“And get rid of that pink thing on your head,” said the woman. “Ridiculous.”
“Of course, my Lady.”
The large displays flickered and split into the images of three women, all of whom might have been a twin of Amy Armstrong if it weren’t for the noticeable difference in age. The woman on the left was older, with wrinkles below her blue eyes and gray streaks in her shoulder-length blonde hair. In the center, the young blonde in the white tank top must have been in her late teens, but the pierced nose, black lipstick, and tattooed arms made her seem older. The woman on the right screen had dyed her hair and eyebrows black, and wore dark-rimmed glasses and a black turtleneck. She held a cigarette in the European style; between the thumb and index finger of her black leather gloves.
“We’ve found another one,” said the scar-faced woman in the chair. “Good data this time.”
The punkish version of Amy hooted with laughter. “Took you long enough!”
“When was the last one we found?” asked the Amy in black. “Not that I haven’t had fun these last few months, but it’s been a while.”
“It doesn’t matter how long,” said the older Amy on the left screen. “Show us the proof.”
“Thank you, Two,” said the scar-faced woman. “For the record, it’s been exactly three months and four days. Here’s a video of the new copy. Check your data feeds.”
An image of Amy in a white blouse, plaid skirt, and black tights snapped to life, sprinting toward the camera. She jumped and pushed an orange cat out of the frame. The screen flashed scarlet and faded to black. The three women reappeared on screen.
“Certainly looks like one,” said the older blonde. “How did you find her? A search on SpaceBook?”
“Waste of time!” scoffed the punkish Amy. “That’s why everyone makes me do it!”
“No, Three,” said the black-haired twin. “It’s because you’re good at wasting time.”
“Shut up, Four!”
The scar-faced woman raised her mechanical hand and the other versions of Amy became quiet.
“It was blind luck,” she said. “I was tracking down a thief on Tau Ceti when this one turned up out of the blue. One of the inspectors tagged their ship with a tracker, sucked the data when they transmatted, and here we are.”
The older blonde nodded. “Impressive.”
“Don’t mess with One; she knows her stuff,” said the punkish teen in the center.
The woman in black took a slow drag from her cigarette and blew smoke from the side of her scarlet mouth. “Do we turn her, or burn her? I say, burn.”
“Turn,” said the older blonde.
The scar-faced woman smiled faintly. “First we try to turn her. I suggest the burden fall on Three. She’s the closest in age to the copy, and will have the best
chance at drawing the girl into a friendship. I’ll provide you with an escape pod. Once you’re inside, find some way to disable their ship. That will give you time to trick them into joining us.”
The punkish blonde nodded. “Right on.”
“If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to do it the hard way. Meet me at Tau Ceti immediately and we’ll coordinate the transmat.”
All of the displays snapped back to a view of the swirling brown planet. The scar-faced Amy swiveled her chair around to face the small gray cat.
“What do you think, Miss Nakamura? Do you think she’ll join us?”
“I don’t know,” said the cat softly. “I just hope no one gets hurt.”
The scar-faced woman smiled broadly, showing perfect white teeth. She reached out and prodded the gray cat’s chest with a fingernail painted deepest red, like the color of blood from an opened vein.
“Someone always gets hurt,” she whispered. “That’s the best part.”
END
Next in the Series: SpaceBook Awakens
The third book of the adventures of Amy Armstrong finds the heroine and her friends stranded in 1910 California. Separated from her friends and her ship, Amy is forced to work with a dimensional twin of herself against an army sent to destroy both of them.
Empire of the Space Cats (Amy Armstrong Book 2) Page 24
